Democracy’s Prospects

The prospects for democracy around the world are at once hopeful and distressing. Today, more than 60 percent of the world’s countries are democracies, and more people than ever before are living in democratic states, and not just in the nominal, self-proclaimed sense of the word. But by some counts democracy is now in its eighth consecutive year of decline worldwide. Democracy tends to advance in fits and starts like that.

Look at the state of affairs today. The democratic aspirations of the Arab Spring are now seen as quixotic, and the democratic reforms that did result proved tenuous and ephemeral. What’s more, Thailand’s democratically elected president was recently overthrown in a coup. And as the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square came and went, the Chinese Communist Party responded to remembrances with characteristic censorship and suppression.

But democracy is far from imperiled, and certainly isn’t facing an existential crisis. Time and again, organic demands for democracy have proved more powerful than strong-armed autocratic repression in the long run. And that’s promising, because democracy is a tremendous force for good.

MIKE BROST Cape Town, June 5, 2014

The writer, a junior majoring in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is studying at the University of Cape Town.